When Valentine's Day rolls around our minds turn to thoughts of romance, and before you know it spring has arrived and love is everywhere you look, from the birds to the bees to the stray dogs in the streets.

Real life romances can go on for decades, but in the fictional worlds of movies and TV shows our favorite characters are often involved in romances that are doomed to end really badly, after the credits have rolled of course.

Thinking about the tragic fate that awaits our favorite pop culture characters may make you feel a bit blue, but don't let their doomed love get you down- let it remind you how good you've had it with your loved ones.

After all, you get to snuggle up in front of the fireplace with your loved ones- instead of hanging out on the wall above it!

Every U.S. president eventually has a portrait hanging in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Last Monday, President Obama's portrait was unveiled. At the ceremonies for these unveilings, the subject of the portrait normally has praise for the artist's talent, often accompanied by a self-deprecating joke about their own appearance. That was not the case when Lyndon Johnson's portrait was made public in 1967.

When he first laid eyes on the painting that was to be his official White House portrait, Lyndon B. Johnson disgustedly called painter Peter Hurd’s work “the ugliest thing I ever saw” and refused to accept it. Hurd was already decades into his successful career as a painter, specializing in portraiture and landscapes of the American Southwest. Arrogant enough to be unaffected by the comment and eager to publicize the president’s “very damn rude” behavior, he readily responded to press curiosity about the incident. Americans were sympathetic toward the scorned artist and increasingly skeptical of the president’s character—a slight that Johnson, who was already seen as short-tempered, could hardly afford. After displaying the piece at a Texas museum in retaliation, Hurd later donated his painting to the Portrait Gallery, which agreed to not display it until after Johnson’s death.

Johnson did not elaborate on what made the portrait "ugly." Hurd's portrait was a very good likeness of the former president, and if anything, it made his look less mean than he was. Plenty of folks speculated as to why Johnson reacted the way he did, which you can read about in an article at Smithsonian that looks into Johnson's way of thinking.

A true capitalist can see the value in any political movement if there is enough money to be made from it. In 1911, women in England were working to achieve the right to vote. A large demonstration was planned for June 17, to coincide with the coronation of George V, in which participants were urged to wear white in solidarity. That, of course, meant buying new clothing, and there was a mad scramble for customers who wished to vote.

Readers of the weekly newspaper, Votes for Women, which was edited by Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, were urged to buy their outfits from firms that advertised there. ‘If they find it pays them to advertise in VOTES FOR WOMEN they will advertise – if they find it doesn’t, they won’t. The more money that flows into the coffers of our advertisement department the better our paper can be made, the wider its influence reaches. Therefore let every woman who believes in this cause never enter a shop that does not advertise in VOTES FOR WOMEN, and let her deal exclusively with those firms that do, and inform them why.’

Women who obeyed this call to arms would have had a good choice of items to ensure a suitably modish appearance during the procession. Advertisers enticed them with pictures of dresses, dainty blouses, charming hats, smart coats and hair care products. The procession through London from Westminster to the Albert Hall comprised around 60,000 women from around the world carrying 1,000 banners and stretched for seven miles. One hopes that they also bought the comfortable shoes on offer!

On the one hand, it helped the cause that so much purchasing power could be harnessed in the fight to change hearts and minds about the rights of women. On the other hand, third-wave (and even second-wave) feminists have to cringe at the image of women buying new corsets, wigs, and "charming" hats for a suffrage demonstration. See more of these ads at The British Library. -via Strange Company

Confidence is a state of mind, which is why all of the pop culture heroes we love exude confidence- because they're fictional people, so if their writers say they're badass heroes brimming with confidence then that's what they are.

In the real world confidence isn't so easily acquired, but a heroic wardrobe will make you feel more confident because if you look good you'll feel good, and no geeky shirt looks as good as a NeatoShop shirt- because our print quality is legendary!

There are a ton of different t-shirt companies out there, but the NeatoShop's got the designs that'll make you feel good about your geeky self.

The NeatoShop also has the best quality print on demand shirts in the biz, and with thousands of designs available at great prices you'll fall in love with the NeatoShop the very first time you pay us a visit.

I've actually thought about the curves and a possible sphere when playing with matches. But it's been long time since I've played with matches, and I never had enough free time to amass this many matches and put this experiment into action. YouTuber All Is Art did it.

What happens when you start gluing matches together? Because the heads are slightly wider than the wooden bodies, they begin to form a sphere. This was an experiment in how many matches it would take to get all the way around to make a perfect globe. After months of gluing and gluing and gluing we made it to the other side.

The answer is 42,000, give or take a few matches. What do you do with this sphere afterward? Light it up, of course!

Monsters have been villified for so long that people still aren't willing to accept the fact that they're just like us, so seeing a bunch of happy monsters posing for a family photo may seem a bit jarring at first. But once you realize monsters aren't all bad, they can be happy and have families that they love, perhaps you'll think twice about calling in the monster slayers to blow them all away like a bunch of savages. After all, how can we call them monsters when humans are so quick to kill each other, and any other form of life on the planet?

Show people the creatures that lurk in the night need love too with this Monster Family Photo t-shirt by Sombras Blancas Art & Design, it's sure to make people scream with delight!

The maps of Middle-Earth J.R.R. Tolkien created for The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings are among the first examples of a fantasy author creating original maps to go along with their novels.

These iconic maps are elegantly simple, with just enough so the reader's imagination can fill in the rest and beautiful hand-drawn lettering that has become an intrinsic part of the world of Tolkien.

Since Tolkien is an intrinsic part of UK history illustrator Dan Bell found a natural connection between Tolkien's maps and the map of the UK's national parks, so he is reimagining the UK parks maps in Tolkien's style:

To start his maps, Bell says that he works from an open source Ordnance Survey map, and begins drawing by hand. “I try to emulate his typeface as closely as possible, but have modified his mountains in an effort to develop a little bit of my own style.” He adds in additional details, such as forests, Hobbit holes, towers, and castles.

Presently, Bell has adapted a handful of the UK’s national parks, as well as places like Oxford, London, Yellowstone National Park, and George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, and has begun offering them for sale on his site. Once he’s done with England’s parks, he says that he’ll move on to converting the national parks of Wales, Scotland, and eventually, more of the US’s parks.

For her latest weird tech project, Simone Giertz teamed up with William Osman to modify her tiny electric car, Cheese Louise. They turned it into a computer mouse. The aim is to draw a picture on a computer screen by driving the car.

What you might need to know is that Giertz only recently got her driver's license, and the car is around 30 years old. So the picture isn't all that much, but the project was a success and the video is entertaining. Osman's video about the project goes into more detail about how they did it, and it's funny, too, but longer.

Ice skating has been around for at least 5,000 years, but for most of that time, it was a method of transportation. The first competitive skating was racing. Figure skating is called that because in the beginning, it was all about making a perfect figure 8 on the ice. There were also some rudimentary "tricks" for show-offs, like jumping over things. Then came Jackson Haines, who is now considered the father of figure skating.

The person credited with developing the artistic side of skating in the late 19th Century is Jackson Haines, an American skater and dancer from New York. “Haines saw in skating tremendous theatrical and artistic possibilities,” Adams writes. “Haines experimented with a form of skating inspired by dance. He fit his skating to music, developed new moves (including the sit spin, which for many years was called the Jackson Haines spin, and invented a one-piece skate.”

But his style and innovations did not gain much traction in the U.S., which was more taken with the English style. So Haines went to Continental Europe to see if he could do any better there.